Background handling in GNOME is very roundabout at the moment.
gnome-settings-daemon uses gnome-desktop to read the background from
disk into a screen-sized pixmap. It then sets the XID of that pixmap
on the _XROOTPMAP_ID root window property.
mutter puts that pixmap into a texture/actor which gnome-shell then
uses.
Having the gnome-settings-daemon detour from disk to screen means we
can't easily let the compositor handle transition effects when
switching backgrounds. Also, having the background actor be
per-screen instead of per-monitor means we may have oversized
textures in certain multihead setups.
This commit changes mutter to read backgrounds from disk itself, and
it changes backgrounds to be per-monitor.
This way background handling/compositing is left to the compositor.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682427
